


to give in (to give up)

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Clergy, Alternate Universe - Priests, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Clergy, Explicit Consent, Fade to Black, Halloween Challenge, Implied Age Difference, M/M, Priest Ignis Scientia, Seduction, Seduction to the Dark Side, Temptation, breaking vows, eldritch abomination Prompto Argentum, fantasy religion and clergy, non-Earth religions, non-human Prompto Argentum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-09 18:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16455443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: They say the more devout the worshipper, the more irrevocable the break, when that person finally decides to renounce his or her vows.





	to give in (to give up)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Amakai, who is actually my FFXV Smuturday confederate, for a Secret Spook exchange in the Discord server we're both members of. (we matched on the pairing that is my best and most wonderful guilty-pleasure pairing. if I have too many feels about these guys, and it shows, please forgive me for being self-indulgent!)

O steadfast Titan, watch over us  
O sharp Ramuh, be our guide  
O gentle Shiva, soothe our weary hearts  
O relentless Leviathan, send us your strength  
O fickle Ifrit, give us your light  
O unbending Bahamut, protect us  
We humble ourselves before you -- we seek your blessings  
We pray for your favor -- we seek your blessings  
We swear fealty to you -- we seek your blessings....

His voice rolls and rolls in thunder, in wave-hammered echoes, and the stone of the altar gleams before him, crystal-sheen rippling and heaving across its mirror-smooth surface, and the words come again and again as he has said them, at the beginning of the day and at its ending, alone and feeling it, feeling the weight of presence always bearing down on him.

The village might be at his back, and he might be the priest that speaks to the Six on behalf of the village’s families, on behalf of the living, but all that life is hidden behind the great black curtains corded in yellow-gold rope. 

Sometimes he’ll hear them praying with him.

Tonight there’s only his voice, and that’s all he hears, now, most days.

Where are the families? Where are the children? Where are the conversations and the laughter, and where are the songs? 

No relief for him, not tonight: it’s a small parish he looks after, strung along a few coves on this windswept shore. Maybe the beaches are still beautiful; maybe the fish and the birds are still fruitful. Maybe the people still pray over the little icons carved out of driftwood and sea-stone, the same little images he blesses with his prayers and sends back out into the world.

The people come and go. The children play and grow older. The icons are brought to him, and are taken away again.

And he’s still locked within these walls, with only the flickering light of candles and the echoes of his voice for company.

The Six are the shadows that sometimes move of their own accord, atop and over the stone altar.

How long has it been since he’s seen another living being?

It’s not even supposed to work this way -- he’s heard of the other villages, the other little towns, where there are three and four priests and priestesses to share the burden of currying the Six’s favor. Three and four other voices to recite the hundred verses of the litany. Three and four other companions to keep each other anchored in the world.

There’s no one here but him.

Heave, heave, his breath catching in his lungs. When was the last time he’d walked up a mountain and back down again? When was the last time he’d thrown himself into the embrace of the sea and its powerful currents? When was the last time he’d smelled the rich scents of the earth, or tasted rain on his tongue, or been warmed by a perfectly ordinary fire, one that hadn’t been set aside for some sanctified purpose?

He traces the familiar old circuit: here is the cold bench set aside for his vestments and -- the weights of yoke and chain around his shoulders, the stifling robes, the collar that takes three shaking tries to unclasp -- he’ll have to put everything on again in a few hours, and he’s so tired, so tired, of carrying his responsibilities all by himself.

Alone, and without any hope of relief. 

There’s a stack of letters next to his tiny narrow afterthought of a cot, most of them returned to him without even being read. He’s been asking and asking for -- companions. Other priests and priestesses to help bear up his faltering voice. To say more prayers with him, for him, for the village. 

And he’ll write another letter, and in the morning someone will have taken the letter away -- supposedly to mail it, when he knows he’s only going to see it again -- 

He almost, almost curses the Six. He almost puts his bare, unwashed hands onto the altar, to stain it with his mortal hands, his mortal touch.

He feels the tears streak down his cheeks instead as he crawls into the bed, as he curls into his makeshift blankets and the weight of his misery, and now he fills the stone room with -- not prayers, not those empty words, but his own gasping sobs and the trembling light of a single candle-flame -- 

“Ignis.”

“No,” he says, after a shocked breath.

A voice, calling his name. 

There shouldn’t be anyone else to say it. No one else is allowed in here. There are no other priests, no other priestesses, and they would have been here with him, or in place of him, and -- there are no other voices, because there are no other people here. 

So that voice is wrong, and shouldn’t be here -- wrong, and he’s straining to hear it again, longing to hear it again -- 

“I can hear you, you know.”

“Please,” he says, and doesn’t know what comes next. He should say, _Please leave._ He should say, _Please go away._

He wants to say, _Please stay. Please speak to me._

_Please don’t go._

But he squeezes his lips shut over the words. Grits his teeth, and he hears the joints in his head and in his shoulders click with the effort, feels the pain that cords down his neck and towards his chest, the bones cradling his clamoring fearful heart, and he tries to hide in the blankets, in the woefully flat pillow wedged beneath his head.

“I said: I can hear you.”

And this time Ignis gasps, out loud, the sound like something shattering against the unfeeling stone, and the hand curving to fit around his shoulder is so heavy. Long fingers, eased over his skin, carefully holding him. 

Holding him in place? 

“Ignis,” that voice says, again.

This close, Ignis can hear the strangeness of that sound. A voice that sounds like it belongs to a young man -- a voice that might have belonged to Ignis himself, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. The high notes of youth, callow and cocksure. He’s heard them before, and sometimes he still hears them, like a drone of obligation, rough and reckless and often a beat or two behind when he’s conducting the daybreak service.

But there’s something different, and almost wrong, with this particular voice.

The high point of his ordination, of his appointment to the ranks of the priests of the Six, had been the moment when they had first spoken to him -- their voices in his ears and a message just for him -- and they had been an overlapping overwhelming overpowering ecstasy: six divine voices, six rising notes of pure power, that had held him suspended and breathless and shivering with shock. He’d felt them, rumbling in his bones, rumbling in his nerves, and every time he completes the litany -- the petitions and the pleas -- he hears a faint and faraway echo of those voices shivering against the stone altar, the stone walls.

And this voice is undercut by something almost the same. Sharp slicing depths in the sounds that make up his name, in the way it’s said by this voice. Edges like teeth, like terror-wails, like the screams of the raptor-birds that still haunt the edges of his dreams. Hungry, he thinks there’s something hungry in that voice, hungry like shadows and like hunters.

He should be denying this voice. He shouldn’t be straining for it, and he certainly shouldn’t be turning toward it, seeking.

Fold of blanket still over his face when he slowly shifts in the bed, aching and tense all over -- presence of a hand that isn’t his -- the ruffle of its movement over his hair, brush of some kind of edge over his forehead, before the cloth is tugged away and -- he keeps his eyes closed.

“Poor man,” that razor-sweet voice murmurs, far closer, and this time it comes with the impression of a mouth brushing over his hair. “Poor lonely man. Abandoned. Alone. Why are you alone here? Here, with your altar, with your gods -- you hear their voices, you feel them, you feel their power, and you’re alone. They don’t stay to help you. They don’t stay to comfort you. They work through you and then they flow out into the world again, and leave you here, and then -- then what is the use of them? What is the use of you, after, left behind by them?”

Those words: he shouldn’t be listening to them. He shouldn’t be catching himself in the act of leaning towards the speaker, towards that terrible gentle crooning. He should be fighting the impulse to agree. Those words are half-blasphemy, half-curse; those words are accusations, the words he’s been keeping locked in the farthest corners of his mind.

And yet the voice keeps going, jagged ruthless: “Maybe the villagers believe in the Six. In their compassion, in their mercy, in their good judgment. Maybe the villagers believe it’s the Six who gives them their little gifts, their little lives, their little consolations, and they give thanks for those mercies. For their blessings.

“And you, priest? You, whose voice speaks for them? Whose voice calls those blessings down for them. Where are your gifts? Where is the mercy that is due to you? Where is the compassion that you deserve? Where are your companions, and where are your comforts?”

“Don’t,” Ignis mutters, and -- he regrets the word even as he says it -- he shouldn’t even have responded, he shouldn’t be encouraging that voice --

So why is he arching up, shaking, into that hand on him, into those words?

Why is he straining towards that low bone-shaking laugh?

The smell of the sea, the smell of the stone, the distant everlasting thrum of the sea-tides -- he has to hold on to them, and hold on to himself, and not give in to this -- visitor. He can’t give in, he can’t listen, he mustn’t --

How many times has he been warned against this, how many times has he fought this -- 

And the fingertip that touches his eyes is so warm, and so gentle, even when he feels the warning of claw, of nail-edge.

Sigh that escapes him, and the treacherous cant of his own body. The simple longing that’s burning in him, for some kind of contact.

Ignis sits up on the bed, and turns back towards the hum and the warmth of the other weight on it with him.

Opens his eyes.

“You,” he says.

He’s seen this face before: sun-kissed skin and the soft shadows of gold-shaded freckles dotted over the cheekbones, down the elegant column of that throat. Shock of bright burnished hair, bits and pieces still moving to the constant wave-beat of the breeze. He might have been one of the youths on the cusp of leaving the village, kneeling for a wanderer’s blessing. He might have been Ignis’s brother, gone into the world to seek his own fortune.

He might have even been Ignis himself, with his eyes turned up towards the realms of the Six.

But those eyes could never have revered the gods -- those eyes! Those eyes could never have been human, or _young_ \-- those eyes that are full of old hurts, old pains, tears that might have been shed in anger but then dried and withered away into nothing but rage.

Young men can’t cry tears like those, he thinks. Young men don’t know what true rage means: rage that flays, rage that smiles like malice, rage that hurls itself against rocks and shores and wears them away.

And even as Ignis watches, the vivid purple-blue of those eyes seems to -- drip away, drain into nothing, flow into shadow-flecked skin and nothing remaining but a beautiful bottomless black, consuming the white and the color alike, pure burning night-eyes.

Lines of strange power webbing his intruder’s skin, red-touched gold, spreading out from the corners of that sly smile. From the hinted sharp edges of perfect white teeth, the hinted long point of that red tongue.

“Beautiful,” Ignis hears himself say, even as his breath hitches in his lungs. 

“No one calls me that,” his intruder says. “And you don’t call me that.”

“I’m afraid of you.” But he doesn’t stop looking. “You, because you’re here. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re not allowed in here.”

Flash of gold in those eyes -- flash of gold in his intruder’s shadows, a congregation of dark shapes that writhe up and along the stone walls, cast from Ignis’s candle in its sputtering fire. Looming over Ignis, where he shivers when he sees them move, out of the corners of his eyes.

“So make me leave.” Sullen soft sharp words. “As you’ve done before.”

“Not this time,” Ignis says.

Why now? Why tonight? What is he doing? Where will he go, after? What will he be, after? The questions flow through him as they have in the depths of so many short night-hours, and this time -- this time he blinks and breathes and lets them go. 

He still has his fear. He still has that doubt, that seed, that -- this is no more than some kind of nightmare. Some kind of test from the Six. Some strange dream that will fall away from him in the moments before sunrise, as he puts his vestments and his collars and chains back on, and leave him cold and alone as he has been for a long time now.

He lets the fear show in his eyes -- but at the same time, he stretches out his hand to the side, to the scant empty spaces of his makeshift room.

Waits. Watches.

Another flash of gold cutting through black -- and one of the shadows detaches itself from the wall, a line of darkness that hurts Ignis’s eyes to watch as it moves and whips in silent agitation, strange rapid frenzied curves and then -- still, it goes, still as its source is unnaturally still.

Ignis waits.

That line of shadow curls around his wrist, cold, and he has to resist the very ordinary instinct to shiver, to shy away. Frost-edges in faint lines on his own skin, fascinating, even when he has to breathe very carefully, so as not to dislodge the dark, so as not to disturb those watchful eyes.

He does give in to the thought of turning his hand, just a little. Palm up, as he would during his prayers, because it’s an invitation, because it’s a surrender. 

An offering.

He waits, ice seeping steadily into his arm and the sensation in that limb slowly dissolving into numbness -- but he can’t break away. The thought doesn’t even cross his mind.

And then his intruder brushes those long strange fingertips over him: almost tender, even when Ignis can definitely feel those points, the warning dagger-stroke of the leading edges.

But the fears are gone. The fears had been linked to the Six. Not to this, this presence. Not to his intruder -- who is tilting his head, inhumanly curious, even as one of those skimming fingertips dips and digs, catches on Ignis’s skin and pulls up a thin welling line of bright red. 

Scent of hot metal, adding its edges to the salt in the air, the salt of his own sweat, the rough burr rolling off his intruder’s skin.

Deep breath, and his fear ebbs away, and all he knows are those eyes, the black depths, the cold edges.

All thoughts of the Six fall away from him, too.

Hiss, feral warning. Gilded hair, bristling. Smile, sweetly cruel and burning.

“What do you want,” his intruder hisses. “Why do you want?”

“I’m tired,” and for the first time Ignis lets himself say the words out loud, so they can be heard, so he can hear them. “I cannot go on as I have. It -- it all means nothing. All of this that I know, or that I thought I knew.”

“I will not be a plaything -- neither to you nor to your Six. I will not be an amusement -- and you cast me aside to your everlasting regret.”

He tilts his head, not quite a nod, and not a refusal. “If you will not be a plaything -- then I will be one. I will be yours.” 

And even as he swallows, even as he shudders, some kind of sharp freedom brushes the depths of his heart, the corners of his spirit -- some kind of truth. 

Tightening grip on his wrist, pulling on him -- he resists, but not to fall away.

He bends, he yields, and presses his mouth in a supplication of a kiss, to that dark shadow-strand.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
